Traffic has taken the zoom out of life

Adair Lara

Published 4:00 am, Thursday, August 30, 2001

MY SISTER ADRIAN demands to know what I am planning to do about all the traffic.

We had been having one of those conversations everybody has lately. Her husband, Joe, told her it was bumper to bumper all the way from Sacramento to Napa. I said it recently took me seven hours to get home from Tahoe, usually a four-hour trip. It took three hours to get from Napa to San Francisco. I had our friend's baby, Julian, in the car.

"This is traffic," I told him as he stared at the cars all around us on the Waldo Grade. "Can you say 'traffic'?"

Of course when trapped in the car we try to be present in the moment -- the sun shining on the bay, a soft breeze coming in the window opened experimentally in the back, making faces at the kid trapped in the Subaru across the way, drumming on the steering wheel -- but being in the moment is overrated when the moment is traffic.

A friend once complained that I used the word "barrel" all the time to describe the way I piloted my car. No such complaints anymore. I don't say "barrel" and I don't say "zip." Or "zoom." My niece has moved into the dorm at San Francisco State, planning to "whip back to Marin" some nights for her job in a movie theater there.

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"Nobody has whipped anywhere on a Bay Area road in 10 years," I say, handing her a list of San Francisco theaters to apply to.

My mom lives in San Rafael. When the kids were little I could get there in 25 minutes door to door, and now it takes an hour, though neither of us has moved.

WE DON'T WHIP, zip or zoom. We drive. Every prospective destination is subjected to the new California driving test: Do I want to be there enough to drive there? Our garden hose has had a hole in it for a long time and waters my shoes every time I water the daisies, but to get a new one I'd have to get in my car and drive to Home Depot, so I don't replace it.

One's own invitation must pass the driving test. We were having this little grilling party, and I wanted my sister Adrian and her husband, Joe, to come, but we live in San Francisco and they live in Napa. So inviting them was like saying, "We are planning to be so witty, and the food will be so heavenly, and the fog is so planning to stay on Twin Peaks and come no farther, that it will be worth getting in your car and sitting in traffic for three to six hours. Barrel on down!"

There are compensations, in that traffic now provides an automatic excuse for everything. Every promised arrival gets a tacked-on, "depending on traffic. " You can leave for a party or a meeting as late as you like, and then just shake your head and say, "Traffic was murder." People whose dinner has been held up, waiting for you, will pat your back and wordlessly press a drink into your hand.

I don't know what Adrian expects me to do about the traffic. Bill and I already walk everywhere we can in the city, or take the streetcar. We are persnickety about going to the East Bay, that busy anthill. But unless we arrange for all of our friends and relatives to live on our block, and for Lake Tahoe to be moved closer, we still have to get in the car pretty often. This weekend we will be the blue Jetta whose shiny butt is creeping along ahead of you.

"What's going to happen?" Adrian said, when I said we'd pick her up tomorrow and leave for Tahoe at midnight, when the roads might be less crowded.

"Do we all just go on like this?"

IN OTHER NEWS: I pointed out the other day that all my terrific ideas for books and T-shirts and cooking shows and the like are wasted on Bill, who never listens even though he's an editor. Reader Virginia Leach says I am not the only one with great ideas that go unappreciated. What are yours?